Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered

In 1849 Ephraim Peabody stated, "America has the mournful
honor of adding a new department to the literature of civilization,--the autobiographies of escaped slaves" (Davis and Gates
19). Almost one hundred and fifty years later the study of the slave
narrative is thriving. As Peabody anticipated, the slave narrative
today is considered an essential component of literary history and
viewed as a quintessentially American genre. Scholars labor to authenticate enslaved persons' stories in order to enter previously silenced voices into the record of what it means to be an American.
The work appeals to many sides of a scholar--it is historical, it is
literary, and it is creative.

But it is also finite. While the works we know of may be debated
and interpreted endlessly, and while an occasional new work may
be discovered, there is a very limited body of work available for
study. We will never know how many authentic slave narratives
have been lost, nor can we begin to estimate how many enslaved
Americans were never able to tell their stories.

The advent of the neo-slave narrative, therefore, inaugurates a
new direction in slave narrative studies. Contemporary fictional
works which take slavery as their subject matter and usually feature enslaved protagonists, neo-slave narratives depend on the his

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